Hydra (Nicholas):

We decided to give our drum circle project a floaty underwater-esque energy. When messing around with video inputs, I found a GIF of jellyfish swimming in the Hydra docs as a starting point.

One of the main things I hated about this GIF was the fact that it didn’t create a perfect loop. Having it as the focal point of the visual part of the performance didn’t look good. As a result, I decided to put it in a wave of color derived from an oscillator with many types of modulation applied.

Having the colors come over the screen in a wave allowed for the looping to be more seamless and created the opportunity for us to add something in the background. Buzz Lightyear was the perfect candidate for this because of this perfectly looping, ominous, and a bit funny GIF.

Placing the sad Buzz Lightyear GIF below the flood of colors adds to Buzz’s expression of hopelessness. I found this a bit funny, and by effectively combining 2 different sources to manipulate, I think it logistically also gave more opportunities to mess around with and improvise during the performance.

Tidalcycles (Ian, Chenxuan, Bato):

Rather than splitting our roles into strict parts, we decided to freely work on the audio together and see what came out of it. This unrestrained kind of jamming had yielded satisfactory results for our previous meetings, and we thought it would be best to run with what had been effective for us. That’s the spirit of live coding, after all—spontaneous inspiration!

We started by laying out a simple combination of chords alternating between two patterns using the supersaw synth, which sounded quite airy and gave off house music vibes. Ian added a nice panning effect to it, which gave it a sense of dimension and made it sound more dynamic. On top of this, we added a catchy melody that fit with the chords using the “arpy” sample, which was then made glitchy with the jux (striate) function.

We also experimented with a few drum/bass patterns that went along with the melodies. An attempt that went particularly well saw us pair the “drum” samples with a random number generator AND a low pass filter with a sine oscillator. This combination allowed for a lot of constant variation in both the literal and spatial sound for the drums, which kept things adequately erratic and exciting.

We tried to match the atmosphere of the audio with the visuals. This meant that we chose instruments that fit a more floaty-ish vibe—the supersaw synth was a surprisingly decent choice—and gave it more of that underwater feel by adding some reverb (the “room” effect) and audial dimension (the “pan” effect). The drum line with the oscillating lpf values also lent the overall audio a fluid, mesmerizing quality that we felt went along with the aquatic theme.